Deterrence and Rogues

The perception of the Bush administration
and the men of ideas around the Bush administration, however faulty, is that
there is a new configuration in the world.

There is.

And in that configuration, the threat
-- even to the most powerful country in the world, but also the world in general
-- is the links among so-called rogue regimes. Rogue states are getting the
capacity to act with weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological, and
chemical -- and there are links to transnational terrorist organizations.
That is the primary rationale for the new preemptive strategy.

Right.

What is your analysis of that apparent
configuration of power, as a Realist? Does a Realist say this is baloney,
or what?

Well, I can tell you exactly what this Realist says.

Okay.

In the first case, in the first instance, one wants to point out that the
word "preemption" here is entirely misleading. "Preemption"
by its dictionary usage, by its common usage among people who think about
military strategy, is what occurs when you have good and very strong reasons
for believing that the adversary is just about to strike. And you strike.
This would make sense if you knew that, and knew it pretty much for sure,
to strike first.

Now, we have no reason to think that Saddam Hussein is about to strike anybody
-- not anybody in the region, let alone Europe or the United States. I mean,
that's entirely fanciful. So it's not a case for preemption. The question
is, is it a case for prevention? The rationale of prevention is that over
time, the adversary will become so strong that you'd better fight him earlier
while he's relatively weak and you can win easily, instead of waiting until
he becomes strong, and then you would have a more difficult war. Well, Iraq
is so weak! Its gross domestic [product] is $15 billion. We're spending almost
$400 billion on our military alone. I mean, it's a pitifully weak country.
Much weaker than it was in 1991, when we fought the Gulf War. And we know
that. American military estimates bear that out.

So the question becomes the one that you posed: Might a country, such as
Iraq, develop nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and then share
them with terrorists? The first point to make about that is they can't use
them, themselves. They are contained and deterred.

That is, the regime, they could not
use it?

Right. No matter how often the Bush administration people say "containment
and deterrence do not work," it works as well as it ever did for the purposes
that we always thought it was designed to accomplish. That is, it deters other
countries from using their weapons in ways that would endanger the manifestly
vital interests of the United States or those it supports. So the question reduces
to: Might they give these things away? Well, I don't think we have to worry
about Saddam Hussein doing that, because if any terrorist ever got weaponry
that they could not well get from sources other than Iraq, we would say, "Saddam
Hussein did it," and we'd slam him. He knows that.

It's a funny thing, that over and over again, people say -- and we hear it
every day -- that these rogues are undeterrable. "Do you want to rely on
the sanity of Saddam Hussein?" George Bush has said, "I do not want
to rely on the sanity of Saddam Hussein." I do! This guy is a survivor.
He's been in power for thirty years. People who are insane do not maintain themselves
in power against a host of enemies, internally as well as externally. I mean,
they have been able -- this is true of Kadaffy in the old days, who we used
to think of as being very roguish (we don't think of him being so roguish anymore).
It's true of Kim Song Il. It was true of his father. I mean, these rogues, these
guys we call rogues, are survivors. How can you at once be foolhardy to the
point of insanity and be a survivor in a very difficult world? It's much more
difficult than winning a second term for President of the United States.

These guys are pressed from all sides, as I say, internally and externally
as well, and they survive. They're crafty. They're ugly, they're nasty; I believe
all those things. But they're also crafty. You've got to carry them out in a
box. They've got power and they want to hold it and they want to continue to
hold it. They want to pass it on to their progeny, as a matter of fact. They
have proved themselves able to calculate where that line is. Crossing that line
means you're going to be put out of business. To be a ruler, you have to have
a country to rule. If you invite intense retaliation upon yourself, you're dead,
and your country is destroyed as a going political entity. Nobody's going that
far. These rogues are self-limiting.

What is your answer to people who
would say that you are too focused on the state as a unit in addressing these
current problems? Obviously, Iraq and North Korea are states, but when you
begin to talk about al Qaeda and what they might accomplish, these are not
states. They are units or entities that could obtain weapons, whether from
North Korea or Saddam Hussein, that conceivably could steal them from the
former Soviet Union, and could act in a way that would affect us and our national
security, if not our relative position in the world. I guess what I'm trying
to get at is, what should the greatest power in the world be doing about these
[nonstate] threats, in a way that's consistent with a Realist's view of the
world?

It's almost impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein -- and these states
do act as units; you could say "Saddam Hussein," you don't always
have to say "Iraq," and the same for North Korea [and Kim Song Il]
-- that he would go to such tremendous lengths to acquire nuclear military
capability [and then be willing to share it]. Remember the Israelis destroyed
their nuclear facilities at Osirak in June of 1981. I mean, this goes back
a long time. There has been a persistent sustained effort on the part of Saddam
Hussein to acquire this military capability. Now, if he ever were to achieve
it, he certainly would not want to share it with anybody. He would guard it.
He would have only a small capability.

It's possible to control a small amount of nuclear materials and a small number
of nuclear warheads, a small number of delivery systems, in a way that is very
difficult if you have hundreds, or especially if you have thousands, as we and
Russia do. If
you're going to steal something, it's a much better bet stealing it from Russia
than it is trying to steal it from a new (and because new, necessarily very
small) nuclear power. If you've got a lot of it, it's hard to keep track of.

The United States has lost track of some of its nuclear material, which a
lot of people overlook or forget about. They've got so damned much of it.
How are you going to keep track of all of it? But, boy, if you have ten or
twenty or fifty, that's pretty easy to keep track of.

It's also very easy to believe, and Saddam Hussein would have to believe
this, that if somehow a terrorist got hold of the nuclear materials or nuclear
warheads, we would say, "We have evidence that this came from Saddam
Hussein." Boom! Like that.

Now, let's separate this from Saddam
Hussein. Let's say that al Qaeda or factions of al Qaeda would come to power
in Pakistan, which is a possibility -- a very divided country and so on. Would
that situation change the equation in the sense that the rationality, which
we can assume that Saddam Hussein has as a survivor in power, would that be
the same of a group? Would they be socialized by state power? Or might they
do things because of their ideology, a deviant form of Islam, which, at one
level, seems to say that to die is good?

One of the striking things about nuclear deterrence is that it has worked,
no matter what country we're talking about, no matter what kind of government
the country has, no matter what kind of ruler the country has had. The most
striking case, of course, is Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. It lasted
from 1966 to 1976 in China, where China was in seemingly unheard-of chaos. And
yet China, a country with a fair number of nuclear weapons at the time, managed
to take care of those weapons very well indeed! The government separated foreign
policy to a certain extent, and nuclear policy completely, from the Cultural
Revolution.

The one thing about those governments -- millenarian or whatever they may
be like -- is that they almost surely will want to stay in power. If they come
to power, they will be deterrable. The difficulty is if irregular groups, terrorists,
get control of weapons of mass destruction. Something like biologicals are much
more of a worry (and chemicals to a certain extent, but biologicals, especially)
than nuclear weapons, I think. Then they are not deterrable. We've always known
that deterrence does not cover this kind of situation.

The cliché now is, of course, and has been for a long time, that you
have to have "an address." You can threaten retaliation against Iraq;
you can't threaten retaliation against terrorists, because you can't find them.
You don't know where they are.

So if it is the responsibility of
the most powerful country in the world, as part of its own interest, to do
some of the management of the whole system, what is a sensible policy for
addressing this threat, which might come from a transnational terrorist group
that does not have power?

What indeed can one do about that? Everything possible to prevent nuclear
materials, including nuclear warheads, from getting into their hands.

We do that to some extent. We've subsidized Russia to enable it to dismantle
its nuclear weaponry and to guard the nuclear weaponry that it does have.
That makes great sense, and we should do more of that. We should continue
to deter and contain other countries that do or might have nuclear weapons.
But if a country badly needs, and therefore, badly wants nuclear weapons,
it is almost impossible in the long run to prevent that country from acquiring
nuclear military capability.

If we declare a country to be a part of an "axis of evil," and if
that country is anyway in a perilously weak position, as obviously North Korea
is, then we'd have to ask ourselves, if we were the ruler -- no matter how nasty
that ruler is -- if we were Kim Jong Il, wouldn't we conclude that, "My
God, we're likely to be attacked, and since we are weak, we'll lose unless we
have nuclear weapons, which have proved to be the greatest and, indeed, the
only reliable deterrent the world has ever known"? Conventional deterrence
has not worked very well. We can figure out why that is, but nuclear weapons
have been a great deterrent. Now, if one were Kim Jong Il, it's impossible to
imagine that he would not want to do everything he can do, so you could make
this less likely by making him feel less insecure. The more insecure you make
him feel ...

See, any fool can see that the only way you can deter the United States is
with weapons of mass destruction. You cannot compete on conventional grounds.
That's absolutely impossible. Russia can't do it. China can't do it. Obviously,
these rogue states -- it's just a fantasy. They could not even begin to, right?
So if they believe that their security is directly in danger and even, indeed,
specifically from the United States, the United States acting in conjunction
with other countries in the area, they are going to do everything they can to
acquire deterrent weapons -- again, the best one being nuclear military means.